by Frank Martin
Sheriff Thompson wanted to show the grief-stricken girl some compassion. It was a terrible situation, but this wasn’t the time to sympathize with her. Especially when she was responsible for a lot of it.
Sheriff Thompson took several hard steps across the grass and grabbed ahold of April’s wrist. “It’s not open for discussion.”
She pulled her arm back, ripping her wrist from the Sheriff’s grasp. “I said no.”
April looked up and shot Sheriff Thompson a menacing glare. Under normal circumstances he would’ve just taken the rude refusal and walked away. He had to. But right now, there was too much at stake, and the Sheriff followed his instincts by drawing his sidearm and aiming it at the teenage girl.
“I’m not asking, young lady,” he said through his weapon’s sights.
Sheriff Thompson wasn’t quite sure how the girl would react and was surprised, almost spooked, when she laughed at the barrel of his gun.
“What?” she taunted. “Are you really gonna shoot me?”
The Sheriff adjusted his grip yet kept his arms firm and steady. “As far as I’m concerned you just used that creature as a murder weapon to kill your uncle and then sent it on a mission to rampage through New York City. So yeah. I will shoot you if I have to because as of right now, you’re my only hope of stopping it.”
April grimaced and raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that a reason NOT to shoot me?”
“Shooting isn’t the same thing as killing,” Sheriff Thompson replied, shaking his head.
April stepped forward but did so with a sigh and roll of her eyes. “Fine. But I don’t know how much help I can be.”
Sheriff Thompson waited until she reached him before lowering the gun and again grabbing ahold of her arm. “We’ll see about that.”
After holstering his weapon, Sheriff Thompson started up the walkway and looked over his shoulder to talk to his deputy still waiting at the bottom of the hill. “Stay with the boy’s body and call for help. EMS. State troopers. The National Guard. Just get everyone!”
The Sheriff kept a firm grip on April’s arm as he walked all the way up the path, past the house, and towards the driveway in silence. She didn’t exactly resist, but she didn’t make it easy either, turning her body to dead weight that the Sheriff constantly had to tug on. Upon reaching his cruiser, he opened the back door and tossed April inside with about as much love as he gave to locals headed to a night in the drunk tank.
Sheriff Thompson felt strange and uncomfortable treating the girl with such hostility. He came to this house to protect her. He thought she was a victim. Hell, she was a victim. Yet the sheriff couldn’t help but feel betrayed by what she’d done. He knew she had a secret, which actually turned out to be several. But a monster living inside the lake? And something that size? It was damn near impossible to fathom.
Sheriff Thompson didn’t quite believe that April had been controlling the beast all along, ordering it to rein chaos upon the valley. But something snapped inside that girl after watching her brother die at her feet. She went from being torn and conflicted to determined and just downright brutal. She turned the monster into a weapon, directing it to eat her uncle without batting an eye. Not that Sheriff Thompson could blame her after what Henry had done but still...The girl’s innocence was gone. If she even had any left to start with at the beginning of the day.
It was all the Sheriff could think about as he zoomed up the valley’s back roads, periodically glancing in the rearview mirror for a shot of April in the backseat. Like a typical teenager, she quietly fumed by staring out the window, her rigid features scowling in silence. But she wasn’t a typical teenager. Not anymore. Sheriff Thompson had to remind himself of that fact as he sought to finally gain some answers.
“So what the hell was that thing?” he asked, breaking the quiet between them.
April barely moved as her shoulders lifted into a haphazard shrug. “No idea.”
“Seemed like you two were pretty friendly,” the Sheriff replied.
He made a conscious effort to keep his voice light and casual. Far from anything remotely sounding like an interrogation.
“Because we are,” April replied in the same mellow tone. “I named him Oscar.”
“Oscar?” Sheriff Thompson repeated, skeptically.
He found the name unimposing for such a monstrous force. The mention of it perked April up, though. She finally looked away from the window to cheerfully meet the Sheriff’s eyes in the mirror.
“Oscar,” she said, enthusiastically. “You know, after Lake Oscawana. You like it?”
Her face cracked half a smile at even the briefest mention of the creature. Whatever it was meant a lot to her, and the Sheriff needed all the information he could get about this so-called “Oscar” if he had any chance of stopping it.
“What is he?” he asked, again pitching his question to sound curious rather than probing.
“I told you,” April answered, her voice terse once more as she turned to look back out the window. “I don’t know.”
Sheriff Thompson sensed her resistance and pushed back equally as hard. “You named him and don’t know what he is?”
April shook her head with her gaze still firmly out the window on the trees passing them by. “What do you want me to say? I found him in the woods.”
An odd image popped into the Sheriff’s head of April, a small teenage girl, stumbling upon that gargantuan beast just sitting peacefully in the forest. “You found that huge thing in the woods?”
April allowed her head to drop into her chest as she chuckled under her breath. “He wasn’t huge back then. He was small. Like a puppy.”
Sheriff Thompson imagined an equally bizarre picture of Oscar running around like a playful dog, chewing on toys and pissing on wee-wee pads in Henry’s living room. He had to shake the thought from his head and told himself it was just the stress and fear starting to get to him. It took a lot to admit he was afraid. Hell, anybody would be when going up against something that size, but all he had to do was remember what was at stake and the lives that had already been lost to snap back to focus.
It was with that reminder that Sheriff Thompson soberly looked up into the mirror and asked the most painfully direct question he could. “Did Oscar kill Brad and Randy?”
April turned slowly, locking onto the Sheriff’s eyes in the reflection. “I assume so.”
It was a vague answer but most likely the truth. Her expression was straight and earnest. Not a shred of remorse or hesitation.
“Did he crash Paul Dutchman’s plane?” the Sheriff asked as a follow up.
Again, every inch of her face barely moved as her mouth provided a genuine response. “He’s certainly big enough to.”
“Damn it, April!” Sheriff Thompson shouted, smacking the steering wheel in aggravation. “Just give me a straight answer!”
He regretted the outburst as soon as it was over. More than that, the Sheriff felt ashamed by it. That kind of behavior was the exact opposite of what he was hoping to portray in April’s eyes. She had enough volatility and rage in her life. She needed compassion. She needed a friend. A grown man, a figure that was supposed to represent authority and protection, was not supposed to lash out at her. A Sheriff was supposed to keep it together. He was supposed to make her believe that she could stop this. That she could change her mind. That it wasn’t too late.
Sheriff Thompson felt he failed at that task.
But April didn’t react to his burst of frustration. Her gaze still bounced off the mirror at him, unchanged and inscrutable.
“I don’t know what he is or where he came from,” she said, her voice steady yet still filled with life. “All I know is that he and Mark have been my only friends this whole summer. Now one of them is dead and the other is rightly pissed about it.”
The Sheriff frowned, having realized he lost the conversational high ground.
“That doesn’t give him the right to eat people,” he said, not wanting to give up hope.
>
“Yeah?” April snickered while leaning forward to peer through the windshield. “Try telling him that.”
Sheriff Thompson curiously followed her line of sight to an opening in the trees where Oscar loomed in the distance. He was probably still a few miles away, so far he almost looked like a toy. His body slowly lumbered forward with every massive step. Not surprisingly, he walked over the parkway headed south, probably towards the city that April sent him to destroy.
A few seconds later and the Sheriff turned onto the onramp, fully prepared to chase the creature down. As his lane merged with the parkway, Sheriff Thompson glanced in the side view mirror and had to slam on his brakes. April jerked forward, nearly smashing into the back of his seat. The Sheriff expected the girl to curse him out for stopping so suddenly, like any teenager would, but she didn’t. Instead, the two of them looked out the window and watched as an endless caravan of military trucks and armored vehicles sped down the parkway, passing them in a blur.
CHAPTER TWENTYFOUR
Oscar had little on his mind but the direction he was headed, a faint tug in the forefront of his head aligning him southward bound. Neither the roads in his path nor the forests surrounding them gave him much pause as he moved. He trudged through the hills, kicking up scores of trees with every step and leaving a trail of cratered footsteps in his wake. Most of the cars unfortunate enough to cross his path veered out of the way. Many wound up in ditches and embankments, desperate to avoid the tentacles swinging like heavy pendulums of death.
Unfortunately, not everyone was able to find safety. A few drivers, those too paralyzed by fear to act, were left stranded in the road. Some managed to luckily escape the beast unharmed as he passed them by. Others found themselves crushed beneath his massive claw, rendered as nothing more than a flattened chunk of flesh and metal road kill.
So focused on his journey, Oscar couldn’t tell the difference between the steps that spared life and the ones that took it. Not that he would care much if he could. Any casualties that suffered along the way were nothing more than collateral damage in his pursuit of April’s happiness.
Her mission had consumed him and become the only force driving him forward. Nothing else mattered or registered in his mind. At least it didn’t, until a gentle wave of stings poked at his backside.
Oscar stopped for the first time since leaving the lake and glanced back over his shoulder. A row of vehicles far different than the ones he’d encountered thus far lined the road. They looked heavy, armored, and equipped with weapons that shook violently. Oscar assumed they were firing at him, but the bullets were so tiny he couldn’t even make them out.
Miniscule figures, ants from Oscar’s perspective in the clouds, poured out of the trucks. Covered in matching green uniforms, the soldiers all lined up in rows similar to the vehicles. They, too, were armed with weapons that began shaking in their hands. Again, Oscar couldn’t see any bullets, but assumed they were firing by the faint yet rapid tapping he felt against his scales. These shots were even softer than ones from before.
Ignoring the attack, Oscar huffed and turned back around to resume his march forward. He took one step and looked down the parkway to see another set of armored vehicles headed right for him. They drove in a straight line, perfectly in synch. Just like behind him, several quick bursts of light flashed on the top of the vehicles as their weapons fired. Oscar couldn’t see the tiny bullets coming towards him, but he felt them more this time as they peppered his face.
Oscar recoiled when the dots pelted his eye, permeating the softest tissue of his body. The feeling was alien to him. Strange and bizarre. He never felt anything like it and wondered if it was the sensation called pain. Whatever it was, Oscar hoped to never experience it again.
As the vehicles before him drew closer, Oscar lashed out with his tentacle, swiping at the truck in the front of the line. The attack smacked the vehicle hard to the side, sending it tumbling over the guardrail and flying off the parkway.
Breaking their perfect formation, the rest of the vehicles all rapidly spun around, screeching their tires against the pavement. A trail of black smoke wafted over the top of them, but Oscar barely noticed as the dark cloud completely dispersed before it even rose past his leg.
Now zooming back the way they came, the vehicles continued to unleash a barrage of gunfire at Oscar, never letting up for an instant. Again, Oscar felt the sharp pangs of metal colliding with his eye and roared in agony. He swatted at his attackers with the other tentacle, but the vehicles had become moving targets, zigzagging back and forth across the parkway. They sped up, trying to put more distance between them and the behemoth in rapid pursuit. Oscar sped up as well, kicking his legs into a trot that pounded the earth like an intermittent quake.
The chase lasted for well over a mile. The parkway was empty, completely devoid of traffic in all directions. The open road allowed the trucks the room to maneuver and weave wildly through every lane while firing continuously.
Right on their tail, Oscar swung his tentacles as he ran, but the vehicles were always just out of reach. Oscar didn’t stop, though. He swiped and slapped randomly, throwing his weight around like a rabid beast. The attacking vehicles evaded every one of Oscar’s attempts to hit them…until they didn’t.
Oscar leapt forward, lifting his tentacle up high and preparing to strike. He brought the thick appendage down hard against the road, smacking it in the middle of the disorganized caravan. Part of the tentacle managed to connect with one of the speeding trucks, crushing the hood and sending the back end of the vehicle flying through the air.
The rest of the pavement cracked and crumbled into pieces from the blow. A tremor split the road in half, and the vehicles unfortunate enough to be on Oscar’s side of the crevasse connected with the obstruction. Some crashed straight into the tentacle and massive chunks of debris. Others flew through the air over the guardrail, eventually crashing into a tree of the surrounding forest.
The front of the armored fleet continued on, as did Oscar. He resumed his sprint right after them with his tentacles raised, shielding his vulnerable eye from their fire.
The army of trucks kept on the parkway as it flowed with the terrain, bending through the valleys and dipping over the hills. Oscar followed on the same track until the parkway curved abruptly before a steep incline in the woods. The fleet banked sharply with the road, but Oscar kept going straight, leaving the parkway to climb up the hillside. The large yet agile creature scaled the incline with ease. Two quick pounces upward and he was perched atop the elevation with a clear view across the land.
Oscar saw the road he’d been on eventually exit the forest. The scenery gradually entered denser and denser pockets of civilization that emptied out into a grimy, urban sprawl in the distance. Beyond that was where Oscar’s destination lay.
He didn’t head that way, though. He turned west and leapt from the hilltop, bounding across the wilderness and roads in his path. As Oscar cut across towns and small neighborhood communities, the monster encountered more cars and pedestrians along the way. He didn’t register any of them as threats and continued on, ignoring the orchestra of honking horns and shrieks of terror that filled the air.
That changed when a loud roar of an engine stretched across the sky. Oscar tried to focus in on the noise that he assumed was still several miles away. It echoed, reverberating through the clouds in two distinct trajectories. That was when Oscar realized it wasn’t echoing at all. The sounds came from two separate sources. Which became apparent when he looked back and saw two blemishes in the clear blue sky expand as they zoomed towards him.
Oscar picked up the pace, galloping through a populated thoroughfare filled with buildings and traffic. Curious crowds scattered as the beast barreled head first into a four-story apartment complex. Bricks and debris rained across the avenue, creating a wasteland in the monster’s trail.
The thunderous booms behind him continued to grow louder as Oscar reached the land’s end. He didn’t s
top, though. Moving full speed ahead, he leapt from the cliff as the roars reached their peak and two fighter jets passed on either side of him. They released two missiles that connected with Oscar’s scales while he plummeted down off the palisades.
The explosions ripped into his sides, blasting a wave of heat into his body. It burned more than Oscar thought it would, but the pain immediately subsided when he splashed into the water. Waves erupted all around him, soaring high into the air before raining down like a misty shower. The water’s cool tingle felt nice and eased the hot spots where the missiles managed to scorch Oscar’s skin.
Looking up, Oscar saw the jets continue on their parallel path over the water before breaking off in opposite directions when they reached land on the opposite side. The river Oscar found himself in was nearly two miles wide, far larger than the lake he called home for several months now. It was also much deeper. Standing straight up, the water nearly completely covered his legs and almost came up to his chest. That didn’t deter him, though. Oscar began wading south through the river, moving one leg at a time by pushing it through the powerful force of the currents fighting against him.
The intense hum of the jet engines, which mellowed as they sped off further inland, began to grow as they came around for a second pass. The distinct sounds even multiplied. There were four of them now, all strong, powerful roars that screamed at Oscar as they approached.
Underlying the noise from the incoming jets was another vibration that sounded oddly familiar to Oscar. It didn’t come from one distinct object but many. A mess of buzzing motorized insects that churned in the water. They were boats. A lot of them. The way they moved reminded Oscar of the vehicles that confronted him, armed and ready to take him on. These watercrafts were organized in a similar formation to those on the road. Oscar had to assume they carried similar weapons, as well. He knew only someone looking for trouble would be daring enough to confront him head on.